Children Are Bored on Sunday

by Jean Stafford

  But the room had its virtues. The rocking chair was comfortable, the table was steady, and there were plenty of clothes hangers in the closet. And Mrs. Horvath kept everything clean. Aside from the fireplace which he had been requested not to use, and the only mirror which was hopelessly defective, and the writing desk which had a limping leg, everything was in “good working order.”

  The exterior of the house was equally noncommittal. It was large, shapeless and built of yellow stone. It stood behind a high brick wall, its back windows overlooking an arm of the sea which, at low tide, was a black and stinking mud-flat. A dump had been made at the end of the water and here was heaped all the frightful refuse of the city, the high-heeled shoes and the rotten carrots and the abused insides of automobiles; when the wind blew, the odor from the dump was so putrid in so individual a way that it was quite impossible to describe. But on a clear day, the doctor could look the other way and see, far off, the live blue Sound and the silhouettes of white sailboats and gray battleships. And while the plants, their windows ghastly blue all night, their noises constant every hour of every day, were almost within a stone’s throw of his window, he had at least the illusion of being in the country. For the lawns in front and in back were healthy, the trees were abundant, and forsythia was blooming now along the wall. He had pondered often in the year he had lived here why so expensive a house (for clearly it was that; its plate glass and the intricate furbelows of its façade testified to suddenly acquired money) had been built on so unprepossessing a site, and at last he learned from a taxi-driver that the original owner had been a rum-runner who had brought his boats up the narrow neck of water and had unloaded them at the cottage in the back yard where now the Horvath family lived. While he was unable to find more than a humorous token in it, he thought with certain pleasure of the interview in which the house had changed hands and become the property of the present landlord, a Roman Catholic priest.

  Sometimes, too, he wondered how the bootlegger would regard the changes he had made in his room, a room which perhaps had formerly been the office for the transaction of his illegal business. And how, for that matter, the priest did when he came on his monthly tour of inspection. Very likely both of them would find it prissy and impractical. He had taken down the pictures he found there: a tinted photograph of the Grand Canyon (which he thought must be the most dreadful sight in the world), a subdued study of an English cottage and one of a vase of asters. In their place he had hung a print of “The Siege of Toledo” and one of “The Fall of Icarus” and a photograph of the bridge in Würzburg. On top of the bookcase were three decanters, for kümmel, brandy and Dubonnet, a little white pot of philodendron, and a pewter tray on which stood two heavy wine glasses and a curious pipe. In the shelves were the few books he had brought with him from Ludwigshafen: Dante, Rilke, Plato, some medical books, Buddenbrooks, Crime and Punishment, The Charterhouse of Parma, and those he had bought here, in the hope, never realized, of learning to read English easily. Those were For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Late George Apley, The Golden Treasury and The Story of San Michele. A cuckoo clock hung on the wall over the bed and on the bureau a large wooden nutcracker lay amongst big pecans in a polished lemonwood bowl. On the bedside table were an ashtray he had bought in Milan, a brown earthenware carafe, a diary bound in green leather, and a silver letter opener.

  When, at nightfall, he drew the windowblinds against industrial America, it was not hard to imagine himself in his student room at Heidelberg. He had never been rich enough to eat at the town restaurants and he had disliked the tepid white food at the Mensa of the University, and so he had made little suppers for himself at his desk. And while now he was quite able to afford four-course dinners (the dearth of doctors for civilians had contrived for him a flourishing and gainful practice amongst Hungarian defense workers and their pregnant wives) he preferred to remain in his room and eat the sort of food he had done when he was a young man. Upon the table he would place the parcels he had brought from the delicatessen: a little sausage and a loaf of bread, a bottle of pickled tomatoes, a carton of Schmierkäse, perhaps a jar of marinated herring. Then, his meal ready, he would pour himself a glass of Dubonnet, light an Egyptian Prettiest cigarette and sit for a while in the chair by the window, staring now at the dark green blind that was punctured here and there, admitting star-like bits of light.

  During the day, Dr. Pakheiser smoked American cigarettes, but he had found that nothing so completely and happily restored his student days to him as the smell of Oriental tobacco, and because he was so busy until he left his office, he could not afford time for the nostalgic meditations it brought. Closing his eyes, he would fancy himself twenty years younger, not yet fat, but even now near-sighted, eating ham and bread and drinking Rotwein in the narrow room of Frau Jost’s flat. Frau Jost was a pretty, friendly young widow about whom he sometimes had romantic daydreams, and she had a daughter of four, a jolly little girl named Greta. Every morning, as Alfred left the house, Greta came to wish him good-by. She clutched in her arms a black cat who wore a red ribbon about its neck. And as he ran down the stairs, she always said, “Please look up at the window, Herr Pakheiser, and I will wave.” Outside, in the steep street, he had to hold his head far back so that he could see the top window, and there she was, on time and faithful every day, to wave her hand and smile at him, still holding her cat.

  Although those years at Heidelberg had been rich and full of importance, it was little Greta Jost that the flavor of the cigarette brought back most clearly. While he had had friends with whom he played chess at Burkhardt’s Konditorei and had drunk with on Saturday nights at the Vater Rhein and while he had even occasionally had a girl, it was his daily encounter with the child that seemed now to fix the days of the past. He had been, even then, a person of strict habit. Once Greta had had chicken-pox and for a week had not appeared at the window, and all that time Alfred had been somewhat inattentive to his lectures and had spent more time at Burkhardt’s. But strangely enough, he had not really been fond of Greta—children, in general, made him shy—and he had even found himself wishing that the ritual had never been established since once it had been, it had to be repeated every day without fail for his complete peace of mind. He was even annoyed if the cat did not appear at the window or if it appeared without its ribbon.

  But what he would not give for Greta now! With a perversity which he acknowledged frankly, he imagined that he had been devoted to her, that he had called her pet names and had dandled her on his knee. And that his relationship with her mother had been intimate. He could even long for the irascible porter at the medical college, for the torpid Badmeister at the public baths who invariably tried to give him a towel which someone else had just finished using. All these people whom he had known slightly or not at all seemed, in his misshapen reflection, to be his friends.

  Dr. Pakheiser was not given to self-pity. A scientific man, he looked on facts. He knew that the Badmeister had no more been his friend than was Mrs. Horvath and that, in the end, Greta was the only one who had that stature. And just so now, twenty years later, he had again one friend, one companion, a solitary daily relation with a breathing creature. His companion was a gray tom-cat who called on him each evening with the same unswerving regularity that had brought the little girl to the window every morning. The cat came at seven o’clock, announcing himself with a trilling mew outside the door. He drank the heavy cream his host had poured into a bowl for him and then he spent the evening, until about midnight, curled up in the doctor’s lap, asleep. Two or three times in the course of the evening, he roused himself to make an excursion round the room, cleverly picking his way through the decanters, patting the trailing leaves of the philodendron to watch them sway. He washed a little and returned and slept again. Half-roused by the turning of a page or the sound of a match being struck, he would briefly purr as if to say that his affection had not lessened, that he was merely preoccupied. At midnight, Dr. Pakheiser took him downstairs, dropped him on the vera
nda and watched him, revived by the night air, streak across the lawn and disappear over the wall.

  The doctor called him Milenka which in Russian, of which he knew a few words, means “darling.” He knew too little Russian, even, to affix the masculine diminutive. “Milenka,” he would say, “I-yi-yi-yi, bad puss! Bad boy. Ah, Milenka!” Milenka was an ordinary gray cat with white mittens, a white snout and a shell-pink nose. He was rather ugly, for he was underdeveloped and rangy and since he spent a good part of the day in the coal bin, his paws were always smudged. But he had a full, healthy purr and a gentle nature. Rarely did he strop his claws on the carpet, and thanks to the doctor’s weekly application of One Spot powder, he had very few fleas.

  Dr. Pakheiser realized once with half-ashamed amusement that he had for Milenka a real love, whereas for Greta he had had only a perfunctory gratitude. It was chiefly, he supposed, because he was the cat’s protector as well as his friend and had it not been for his suppers of cream and herring, the poor thing would have had to shift for himself on the dump. Indeed, he was quite sure that if he moved away, Mrs. Horvath would have the cat destroyed, for she had not known, she declared cantankerously, when she took over the job, that she would have an animal to care for as well as beds and bathtubs. No one knew where Milenka had come from. The landlord disclaimed all knowledge of him; the former manageress denied that she had ever fed him or invited him in any way to stay.

  The doctor neither liked nor disliked animals. He had always been indifferent to them, save for police dogs whom he feared and cocker spaniels whom he scorned for their somehow homosexual softness. He had never known an individual dog or cat well. So this strong feeling about Milenka perplexed him. Was he turning into an old lady? And would he, together with his cat-fancying, get notions before he was fifty? But these speculations did not really worry him; he was sure that his fundamental motive in helping the cat survive was that he did not like Mrs. Horvath and by his lavish purchases of fish and cream, he was deviously repaying her for her impertinences.

  Mrs. Horvath was a dirty, dumpy person in a brown coverall and a blue work shirt. She was anti-Semitic in the most extraordinarily forthright way Dr. Pakheiser had ever seen. On the first day of her regime she had been introduced to the doctor by the departing manageress, and she had said, “I think you are Jew, Doctor. But I get rent every Wednesday all same. You don’t worry.” Each time he recollected this speech (delivered with a smile which could not have disarmed a child) he was so taken aback that he was never able to analyze exactly what she meant. Evidently it was her intention to announce her antipathy to Jews at the very outset so that her tenant would not start off under a misapprehension. It became clear, after a few days, that her rule was firm: she decidedly was not one of those people who say, “Some of my best friends are Jews.” On the contrary, she would say, “I hate all Jews.” In a way, he preferred her attitude to that, say, of his office girl, Miss Johnson, who, with aggressive piety, often congratulated him on being one of the chosen people. With Mrs. Horvath, he was dealing with an armed enemy and war, with her, was war. Miss Johnson, on the other hand, while less wounding, was more treacherous. She could catch him offguard when he was fatigued and, sympathizing with him for being uprooted from his country, could make him prey to a burning, unobjectified anger on behalf of his whole race, and to a weepy grief for himself. Then he would despise America, Connecticut, his cramped and cluttered office, the strapping great charwoman who cleaned it, the smell of workmen in the waiting room and of workmen’s cigarettes, but most of all he would despise Miss Johnson.

  Milenka was the immediate cause of war between Mrs. Horvath and Dr. Pakheiser. About two weeks after her arrival, she came one evening to collect the rent. Seeing the cat curled up on the pillow of the bed, she wrinkled her low forehead, bunched up her flat Magyar nose and said, “Cat! I like dog. I like cat. But outside. Not in the house. In Europe, we have dog, we have cat, but all outside. Inside they make their doing on the carpet and all where. Outside, Doctor, I must ask you.” Dr. Pakheiser, unnerved, a man who preferred on all occasions to agree, cried, “I see!” and pretended to himself that this was only a humorous crotchet she was airing conversationally. But she remained firm in the doorway even after he had given her the money and then, so suddenly that he scarcely realized what was happening, she bounded forward toward the bed, shrieking, “Out! Out, you!” and Milenka, his eyes widening with terror, leaped from the bed and ran out the door.

  The next evening, though, admitted to the house by the man who left for the graveyard shift at Chance Vought, the cat came back, and the doctor, emboldened by his desire for company and his need for continuing custom, again opened his door. Every night thereafter, except on Wednesday when the rent was due, he came and was not turned away. Mrs. Horvath, to be sure, was aware of what was going on. In the morning when the doctor went downstairs, he usually found her indolently flicking a dust cloth over the newel post or frankly reading the lodgers’ postal cards or sitting, sprawled like a big tom-boy, in one of the chairs of the foyer. She would give him a look half scornful, half angry and would say, “I don’t know what happen to you when Father come and see those places on the carpet with sausage marks.” Or she would tell him, jeeringly, that Father was going to be outraged when he saw the hole in the curtain the cat had clawed. “I tell you, Doctor,” she would say, “on the grass, okay when they lose their hair. Outside, all right. Inside, on the cushions, hell’s bells!” Sometimes she would simply ask him, in the derisive voice of a bad schoolboy, “How you find Milenka last night, Doctor? Plenty good fleas on him, eh?” And once, reaching the limit of her insolence, she followed him out the door and paced up the driveway, calling shrilly, “Milenka! Milenka!”

  When he was not in school, the manageress was accompanied by her thirteen-year-old son, a large boy with a malicious face that forever grinned under a sailor cap. Occasionally it was he who came for the rent and Dr. Pakheiser, fumbling in his wallet, felt that the boy with his obscene leer had expected to find dirty French pictures on the wall or a light woman in the bed. “Hey, Doc,” he said once, “you like that cat?” And the doctor, laughing violently, replied, “Ach, yes! Very much.” Freddie continued. Pretty soon now “that cat” had better watch its step for he was going to trap and tame some birds and if that dope of an old gray dumbbell got one of them, it would be “good-by, cat.” Dr. Pakheiser, baffled by the assurance of the outsized youth, cried, “Ach, so!” louder and more amiably than ever.

  So far, no birds had been caught, but Freddie, on Saturday and Sunday, worked all day long making his traps out of wooden crates, and in time the back yard was so full of them that it appeared he intended to catch entire flocks. And the doctor had no doubt either that Milenka would chase the birds or that Freddie would cruelly punish him.

  II

  On this damp April evening, Dr. Pakheiser was about to draw his windowblinds and prepare his supper when he saw Mr. Horvath come out of the cottage bringing a step-ladder which he set up underneath an apple tree. At his approach, the blackbirds all flew off, twittering irritably. Some time before, he had built a bonfire at the water’s edge which now was burning brightly, sending up bits of charred paper, like smaller blackbirds. The man called out, “Hey, Freddie, come here a minute.” And Freddie came charging through the door, wearing a baseball mitt on one hand. There was a colloquy which the doctor could not hear and then the boy, rushing to the bonfire, hurling his mitt to the ground, cried, “Oh, boy!” He lighted a torch and came back to the step-ladder, sedately so that the flame would not go out, handed it to his father and then climbed up. At the top, he wavered a little and let out an exclamation of fright, but he regained his balance and stooped down to receive the torch. He was just tall enough to reach the puffy white tent of caterpillars in a high crotch of the tree. The doctor watched, sickened, saw yellow flames shoot up as the fat tumor caught fire. Freddie had not thought ahead. A worm fell upon his upturned face and he screamed with revulsion and let the torch drop
to the ground where it went on burning and sending up black smoke. The work, though, was done and while his father beat the caterpillars to death with the back of a shovel where they had fallen in the grass, the boy came down the ladder and went toward the cottage, wiping his face with both hands as though it never would be clean again. Mr. Horvath laughed at him and went on killing the pests. Mrs. Horvath came to the screen door and hooted at her son, “Ha! Ha!” she laughed. “You keep the mouth open next time and see what comes in.” Restored to his normal spirits, Freddie hooted back, “Yeah, like fun I will! Yeah, in a pig’s valise I will!”

  There was a miaow at the doctor’s door. He drew down the windowblind sharply, shuddering at what he had just seen. There was something primeval in those people; their communal enjoyment of the annihilation of the caterpillars was so stupid and so brutish that the doctor actually retched. Then he let in the refined, soft-moving cat.

  “I-yi-yi-yi!” he said, stooping to pick Milenka up. “I-yi-yi-yi, my bad puss, my bad boy.” Milenka stretched his head forward and rubbed the top of it against Dr. Pakheiser’s chin, purring loudly. “Milenka,” murmured the man. “Ah, my good friend, my dearest one.” He poured the cream into the cereal bowl, fetched a quart of Irish ale from the window sill and, sitting down, said to his companion, “Gut’ Mahlzeit.”